Houchun Harry Hu1, Kyunghyun Sung2, Krishna S. Nayak1
1Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA; 2Department of Radiology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Robust saturation of longitudinal magnetization is necessary for many abdominal imaging applications such as dynamic contrast enhanced imaging to maximize contrast-to-noise ratio, renal arterial spin labeling to suppress background signals, and RF transmit (B1+) mapping with the saturated double-angle-method. This work demonstrates the design of tailored RF saturation hard-pulse trains that are appropriate for addressing the large B0 and B1+ variations that exist across the human abdomen at 3 Tesla. We show that trains consisting of three to five hard pulses with varying sub-pulse areas provide more uniform saturation than adiabatic BIR-4 pulses and constant-area 90 hard pulse trains.